BBC wins World Cup battle

More than 11m viewers tuned in to watch Brazil's 2-0 win over Germany on the BBC, confirming it as the convincing winner in the battle for World Cup audiences.

The final on BBC television captured an audience share of 62% - the highest BBC One audience for Sunday lunchtime for more than 10 years.

"
The World Cup has been an outstanding tournament on the pitch and across the BBC
"
BBC Director of Sport Peter Salmon

Peter Salmon, BBC Director of Sport, said: "The World Cup has been an outstanding tournament on the pitch and across the BBC.

"On television, interactive, radio and online, records have been broken, and we've earned the right to say that the BBC is yet again the place for the big occasion."

The audience peaked at 11.6m for the closing stages of the game in Yokohama - four times more than watched it on ITV, whose coverage peaked at 2.5m with a 14% share.

The Match of the Day highlights programme on Sunday evening also attracted more than 2m viewers.

The viewing ratio for the BBC over ITV was three and a half to one for the matches broadcast simultaneously on both channels.

This is a much higher ratio than for previous World Cups.

Eight of the 10 most watched matches in the World Cup were on the BBC.

Up to 16.8m had watched England's second round victory over Denmark while more than 13m tuned in to see England beating Argentina.

However this year's figures were still some way short of the best-ever World Cup audience, when 24m people watched England's game against Argentina at France 98.

June was also a record-breaking month for BBC Sport Online - our unrivalled coverage of the World Cup helped the website register more than 250m page impressions.

We also received appoximately 130,000 e-mails to the Sports Talk section during the tournament, while there were around 250,000 downloads of Mini Motty and nearly 500,000 playing our World Cup warrior game.